


L'optimisme

by Aphoride



Category: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Movies), Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: (Advice Welcome On Native Culture!), Angst, Community: HPFT, Community: grindeldore, LGBTQ Themes, London, M/M, Mixed-Race Dumbledores, Native American Character(s), Native American/First Nations Culture, Not Fantastic Beasts Compliant, Period-Typical Homophobia, Period-Typical Racism, Queer History, Romance, Seers, Taking the Bits I Like From Fantastic Beasts and Putting Them In My Own Canon, Travel, War Themes
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-22
Updated: 2018-11-29
Packaged: 2019-08-27 15:24:11
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 2
Words: 7,867
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16705036
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aphoride/pseuds/Aphoride
Summary: A conversation without end is like a sandstorm: it encompasses everything, swallows it all and whirls, whips round from place to place, set on a pre-ordained path it is impossible to stop and building - always building to a breaking point; the crashing thunder of an argument.And what are wars but arguments out of control?





	1. Silence

Silence

Kneeling on the landing at the top of the stairs, I peered between wooden slats - sanded down and polished until they shone a deep, honey-tinted brown - at the front door. It loomed, then, up towards me: tall and dark, draining light from the air around it; though there was little of that to go around - Mama had been round a while before, dousing the candles one by one until the only one left stuttering was the one in the round window to one side, next to the keyhole.

Outside, the wind was howling, whipping itself up across the moors before it steamed through the village in a rounded sound which rattled the tops of chimneys and the creaking sign above the local pub. The leaves shook and the branches cracked from side-to-side; in the morning, there were a litany of broken limbs over our garden, down the twisting, turning road, the first buds of Spring still clinging to some of them, pinkish and plump.

I could hear nothing else, no matter how hard I strained, how hard I wished and wanted and hoped.

The desperation of children is a heartbreak like no other; it lingers, constant, breaks and re-breaks.

There on the stairs, I waited as the grandfather clock in the hallway rang through the hours, heavy and sombre, always six seconds precisely before the church bells in the village square would start rolling and swaying in their long, cacophonous chime.

Nine o'clock came and Mama emerged from her bedroom, a bowl in her arms she would not let Aberforth see inside; instead, he sat next to me, silent and still. Ten o'clock and Mama chided us both: time for bed. Eleven o'clock and Mama made a pan full of cocoa over the fire in the drawing room, bringing mine up to me with warm hands and a smile which glittered.

Midnight and Aberforth fell asleep, curled up in the armchair in the hallway. Mama carried him carefully to bed and kissed his forehead before closing the door.

One o'clock in the morning came and I slept - I think, at least - with my head on the railings and woke, when the bells rang for two with a pair of thick red lines imprinted into my skin.

At three o'clock, I sat with my legs dangling through the slats and read aloud, running through every story Beedle the Bard had put down and starting over again.

At four o'clock, I slept, and at five o'clock, the same.

Six o'clock and I woke with a start to the sound of footsteps outside the house, but alas, it was only the farmer, delivering a quartet of milk bottles. If I cried then, no one knew.

When seven o'clock came, I finally abandoned my vigil and took myself downstairs to the kitchen, lathering a slice of bread with thick blackberry jam, fetching myself a plate of cheddar cheese, an apple and a glass of milk. I put water in the saucepan on the hob and lit the fire underneath like father had showed me: with a swish and a murmur of nothing in particular; to make tea for Mama when she woke.

At eighteen minutes past seven, the Aurors knocked on the front door and that long, silent, watchful night came to an end.

Still, I did not say anything; I sat, sandwiched in on the bottom step between the wall and Mama, holding Mama's hand and terribly, impossibly lost.

In the end, I was glad to leave that house behind: a quiet - unsettling, fragile - had settled over it like a shroud, clinging to everything and dulling all those clangs and clatters of ordinary life so that the big things, the screams and the tears and the shouts, echoed cavernously around, trapped underneath and deafening.

With that kind of logic so unique to children, I was certain that in a different house, in a different place, surrounded by different people and a different landscape - bumping, bulging hills with snaking, looping valleys and scooped-out vales, rather than the flat, mist-laden moors of my infancy - the silence would fall away from us as we walked down the lane, left behind like dust and the carpets on the floor, bolted down and worn out.

How disappointed I was, how oddly afraid, when it slithered out of our trunks and draped itself over our new house!

It grew and it grew and it grew, embedding itself down in the garden, twining about the very foundations of the little cottage, its heart in our sitting room, back arched over the roof and one hand splayed over the front door.

When Mama died, the explosion rocked the house, shattering the windows and cracking the walls, leaving a jagged rip in the kitchen tiles like something heavy had swung and cut through it, eating it and crushing it into fine, yellow-tinted dust. It did not cut through the silence.

Then, of course, you came.

And that creeping, suffocating silence tore in half and burned, smoking up in a loose, dark spiral and swept away on a brisk summer-evening breeze, cool and light.

You laughed and I laughed and how odd it felt to laugh in that house, how delirious it seemed to run up- and down-stairs, clattering about, as though a dam somewhere had been burst and noise was pouring out from every corner, thundering down the rickety stairs in a long, steady rush now that it had finally all been freed.

Ah, two months of madness, then, loud and glorious and feverishly secret - but what, is the question, came after?

* * *

_29th September 1899; Godric's Hollow, England_

It had been almost a month. It had felt at once like an eternity and like mere hours; time did not seem to matter much then, as though it were something which happened to others, but not to me: I was removed from it, detached, moving through life with a kind of aimless instinct, an automaton sipping tea in front of the fireplace, beginning yet another letter and shredding it methodically, beginning it once again and shredding it again, over and over and over until it was night-time and I manoeuvred into bed, flat on my back and staring up at the ceiling.

It was cold, then, and I froze, hands folded on my chest, down by my sides, curling onto a side and burying my face in the pillow.

There was a draught where you ought to have been.

How foolish and naïve it was to think like that: to lie awake with one hand on cotton sheets, smoothing out wrinkles, and think that you had once been there, that perhaps there was a chance you might be there again! We had diverged, you and I, rivers around a mountain and we would not meet on the other side.

Even if we did meet again, how could we be anything like what we had once been?

We were not the same. I was not the same.

(How was it then, that I still thought of you the same? That when my mind turned to you, I thought of your soft, subtle smile; your habit of brushing your fingertips - two fingers only - across the pulse-point of my wrist in a brief, feather-light caress; the way your voice fell over consonants and vowels in a green-tinted tone; how it had felt - mad, bold, wondrous - to lean in and kiss you, the soft puck of parted lips as we split and the way your eyes would flutter, long brown eyelashes dusting over your cheeks, before you looked up at me.

Oh yes, I remembered the flickers of something wild in your eyes, the colour of fervour in your voice; how sometimes, sometimes when sitting in my room or in our grove by the brook, you had spoken, gold scraped away to reveal iron underneath, cold and bloody, which had made a trickle of unease, nervous and guilty, run down my back, turning my stomach and twinging at heartstrings.

I remembered how Aberforth had screamed when you cursed him; I remembered how you had watched, red light spitting from your wand, your eyes glimmering with a silvery, eldritch light, eager and furious and storming.

I remembered how you had whispered to me one night, drawn and pale and feverish, reaching for me with hands which never quite made it, "I can do nothing without you."

How could they be one and the same? How could you exist in two different fashions - separated in my memories into Jekyll and Hyde and languishing, prowling in different halves of my mind.)

Every night for weeks after it was the same: I would sink into the cold stretch of the bed and lie awake, staring up at the ceiling until my eyes tired; closing them and half-dreaming, half-reliving at last, tumultuous afternoon over and over and over again. Eventually, my mind noisy and nerves frayed - more awake then than I ever was during the day - I would rise from the bed again and sit at the old, heavy desk in front of the window, sifting through piles of letters, papers, copies of journals and newspapers.

Staring blindly out of my window as the sky tumbled and turned though a kaleidoscope of colours: from deep, midnight blue to a purple edged with gold as the sun began to rise, the pale starlight to the weak, waterish rays of first sun; I would sit, chasing thoughts around my head again and again and again. The same thoughts, the same memories, the same relentless feelings in a merry-go-round of ghastly smiling horses, winding faster and slower, the music sad and angry and joyously happy.

Eventually, I would crawl into bed, chilled and exhausted, and sleep a wakeful, fitful sleep.

Then, mornings.

Dawn, cold and thin, with yellow-pink fingers slipping through my curtains and fluttering over my eyes, waking me from a strange tumble of dreams and nightmares and clear-cut memories; in those moments, with one foot on either side, I would be so certain I that that summer had never ended - I was there still, with you just out of reach, just out of sight, but waiting, waiting for me to reach out and feel the way your curls spun through my hands, how you would stir and mumble something incoherent when I touched you, brushing a hand over your back, down your arm.

I could hear Ariana hum, could hear Aberforth stomp downstairs and my mother clattering in the kitchen; smell the sweet, light tea she brewed over a tiny bluebell flame on the hob.

The faint chords of something - opera, maybe, or a concerto of some kind; swaying and full with a sixteen-piece orchestra and a single voice rising - trickling out from under the door of father's study.

And you, again you, the warmth of you so close.

Like all illusions, it was so easily shattered.

(I opened my eyes - and how terrible the world was when I did.)

I do not believe I ever told you, through that long, glorious summer which went both too slowly and too fast, quite how beautiful you were in the mornings. For that, I must beg your pardon - you may consider it the first of many things I should have told you but never did; though whether out of fear or nervousness or the sheer confidence that there would always be a next time to do so, I cannot say.

You were, though, beautiful, even then.

They were always the same, those mornings.

I would wake first, my arm around your waist, your head pillowed on my shoulder or tucked into my neck. If I tried to pull away, or even simply to move, you would dig your fingers into my skin and refuse to let me go, finding some new way to nestle ever closer - though I suspect that if I told you this now, you would deny that you had ever wanted me close, had ever allowed yourself to be held like a child in such a way. You did both, though, once upon a time; I remember it all quite clearly.

Even then, so very separated from you, as I wandered, absent and sickly afraid, down the paths on the edges of Godric's Hollow - on the edges, but never quite going inside the town boundary; I stopped each time at the stone marker, a slab some two feet high, moss creeping up its length, towards the rough-cut block letters spelling out the name of the village, stopped and waited and turned back - I could not help but end up thinking back to it, to those scattered, dreamlike memories, technicolour things that they were: in my room, stretched out on the grass in the garden, tramping through the fields and the woodland to the brook.

How short two months seems now! I blink, and it vanishes before me; Time is swallowing me whole, weathering me down. How long it was, how endless it felt - you and I, falling into a façade of domesticity; a pretence of the simple life, free and easy.

I always woke first, my arm around your waist, your head pillowed on my shoulder or tucked into my neck. If I tried to pull away, or even simply to move, you would dig your fingers into my skin and refuse to let me go, finding some new way to nestle ever closer - though I suspect that if I told you this now, you would deny that you had ever wanted me close, had ever allowed yourself to be held like a child in such a way. You did both, though, once upon a time; I remember it all quite clearly.

We would be in my room more often than yours, secluded in our own private haven away from the accidentally prying eyes of siblings and aunts. It was easier to stay in my house (my house - how strange it feels, even now, to weigh those words in my tongue when imagining the house in Godric's Hollow) than in your Aunt's - Aberforth ignored us whenever possible and Ariana slept in the basement, where it was cold and solid and safe.

In my room our only enemies skulking around were the heaps of books on the floor, the pointed tips of quills lying on sheets of parchment half-full of scribbles and illegible thoughts in a mess of languages; there, privacy, that thing we cherished so greatly, was plentiful, even with the curtains open and the window ajar during those hot, sticky August weeks.

You used to joke that you had brought the continental summer with you, do you remember?

Outside the window, the blackbirds nesting in the tree which tickled over onto the windowsill would sing, and I would lay there, my eyes closed, listening them warble, light and fluted. In those moments, I was always blissfully content, happy to remain there as long as you wanted to, your breath ghosting over my collarbone, a soft harmony to the birdsong.

After a while, usually around eight o'clock (you were wonderfully predictable in the mornings, my darling), you would stir and press a kiss to the base of my neck. Your little way of telling me you had awoken - though I never needed it, feeling the shift and change in your breathing beforehand, so I came to predict it, to wait for it, that one little kiss, tremulous and gently bold. In return, I kissed the top of your head, murmuring ‘good morning' into your hair as it tickled across my bare shoulders.

You would turn, slowly, so slowly I became convinced over the weeks that you did it only to tease me, onto your back, a strip of cold settling across my chest as you pulled your arm away to clutch at the tops of the sheets, your curls splayed across the pillow, gold on white cotton, and smile at me, smile for me: sweet and warm, a faint, shimmering thing which lingered in the corners of your mouth and the glitter in your eyes, caught by the sunshine filtering through the window.

"Perhaps," you would whisper to me every morning, your voice sly, a coy smile curling your mouth. I wanted to kiss you every time, to press that smile into the folds of your skin to stay there forever; I never did. "I should leave. Your brother will be awake soon, and I must get back before my aunt notices I am gone."

Skin-to-skin, with laughing, half-asleep eyes and your fingers grazing my jaw, I kissed you, sometimes soft and slow, sometimes fierce and messy, a clash of tongues and teeth and your hot breathless gasp on my lips.

You spoke once of sacrilege, of perversion and sin and what it meant to stand in front of God and say, I am not Yours; I am how You made me and nothing more, how it felt to defy His law and rewrite it for yourself, designing a place at the table where you could sit exactly as you were. I did not understand it then - to me, who had rarely been to church, who had always seen it as this other place, quiet and cold and solemn, where I went for deaths and births and to sing at Christmastime, it was fantastical in its way: bizarre and enthralling and absurdly quaint.

I think, perhaps, I understand it a little more now.

Then, standing on the edge of Godric's Hollow, long blades of grass swishing over my feet in a swaying, swooshing flutter, with mother's cottage (always mother's, never mine, even if it had been for far too long) just in sight as a sliver of beam and brick, it felt wrong to take a step further, to breach that border and step inside.

As though I would burn, almost, Nosferatu-like: condemned and thrown out.

It had been days since I had even spoken; weeks since I had uttered anything more than a couple of short, muttered words. My throat seemed too tight, too full with tears which trickled painfully, squeezed out only when there was no room for more; in my mouth, my tongue was fat and puffed, too big to fit properly, bunched up and pressing down, down so I struggled to breathe.

Grief is a strange thing: it clogs you, smothering you and swelling up from the inside until you feel you will burst. You never do; it just keeps on growing and growing and growing.

At that junction where the house met the fields over the hedge and up the banked hills, I could see a whisker of a brown coat-sleeve, a handful of red, and I fancied I could hear the bleating of the nanny-goat from here: that singular, flat-toned voice.

Aberforth was there, tidying and tending as he had always done. As he had always loved. As I should have done.

I wanted to go over, to say something - anything, anything at all would be a start, perhaps - but I could not move. I could not stop watching him as he dug his hands into the earth and kneaded, pushing at the soil with his knuckles to make space of the bulbs for the next summer, my hands in my pockets and my knees locked straight.

"Get out!" he had told me, in the moments afterwards when the door had stilled behind you and the brick-dust and shattered slips of glass finally settled on the ground, Ariana's lips already tinted with a blue more final than her motionlessness.

For a clutch of heartbeats, I had stared at him, unblinking, seeing but not believing, hearing but not understanding.

Get out. Get out - but how could I leave? How could I leave her? How could I leave them both?

He had risen, trembling, pale and furiously sad, looming over me as I sat, still, on the sofa.

"Get out!" he shouted, and it was raw, bloody.

I flinched.

Then, I left.

(I had returned once - only once, and my father's words when his mother died had echoed around my head: "it is what you do when someone dies. You go to their funeral to honour their achievements, to respect their struggles and their life. Nothing less. It is a tradition, yes, but it is an important one."

Aberforth had begrudged me every minute I spent in Godric's Hollow that day. I had not been welcome, merely tolerated and only for so long as was necessary to honour as was respectful, required, traditional.

It had boiled under his skin, rising behind his eyes in a hot, fused keg, and I could not blame him for it.)

Silence is an impossible power: it contains within itself - perhaps only a second long, a heartbeat's pat - a myriad of possibilities, each one anxious and unknowable, stinging one after another after another in a whirl too fast to voice; and yet, and yet it is so rarely noted.

Life is noted down in words and actions, those things big enough and loud enough to catch the sight of chroniclers, the eye of a discerning historian years after the fact. They will be immortalised, engraved into the fabric of time, the story of the world, to be read over and over again by scores of students who read them blankly, black-and-white and little more, seeing how they ended lives, started others, made marriages and alliances blossom and grow, broke hearts and chains and promises, rewrote laws and destinies; began and ended wars.

It is fitting, is it not, my darling, that this is how we shall we remembered, you and I? Not by the silences we shared, one breath between us and a heart's length away as our candles flickered like beacons in the night; not by the hitched gasps, stolen and gentle, or the half-swallowed cries as hands gripped thighs and heads tipped back; not even by the whispers we traded, secret and tremulous in dim, watered moonlight.

Remembered by the calls, clarion calls and maxims; words to live by, to die by.

For the Greater Good.

Für das Großere Wohl.

Standing there, with the grey-blue damp of an early autumn cloaking me entirely, it seemed as though in all my life before then, words had been rationed, carefully stored away until absolutely necessary, carved up into smaller and smaller slices to savour them on and on - as though I had spent most of my life caught in this wretched, endless cycle of silence and silence, stretching out over months and years, voices and words bursting like a fanfare in between.

When I think of you - without thought or effort at all; I close my eyes and you are simply there, my darling - you are always silent; wordless and voiceless, and I cannot decipher anything of you at all.

I cannot help but wonder how much I lost by wasting so much time in prideful, petty quiet; whether if I had been just a little braver, wiser, more hopeful and breached the barricades I had built around me, born of a bone-deep fear which paralysed and sealed my mouth shut, things might have turned out differently.

Father might not have been taken; mother might have known me; Ariana might have lived - and you and I, you and I, might perhaps have never found out that our bower by the brook was founded on gunpowder.

Perhaps, perhaps - but who can say?

Ah, darling, not you or I, and so I remain, as always, mute, our perpetual argument winding out across the sea in a mist of white-crested foam and salt-soaked diamonds.


	2. Wales

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Home; a strange, instinctive place.

Wales

The air was rushing by, spinning me round and round like a hurricane, my head dizzy, my eyes fluttering madly from one thing to the next; outside me, outside the whirlwind I was caught in, the landscape reeled and raced, stretched thin and faded in the way that such fast things are: trees widened, then snapped back together and houses ran on, running into each other, into hedges and forests, and wide-open lakes.

Over the sea as it strolled beneath me, the far-off tides swaying with the current only small, white-marked lines which flicked and tricked my eyes as I spun, my hands cold on the grip of the old coffee pot. Islands passed, little specks of sandy green, and the faint jagged scrawls of coastlines in the distance, just below the horizon, strolled past: sedate and worn and old.

Pressure pulled at the corners of my eyes, licking away tears and drops of moisture until they were dry and sticky; it sucked the air out of my lungs, tugging from inside in a strange, swooping feeling as though my chest was caving in, collapsing in on itself like a dying star. The muscles in my arm, all down my back ached in a raw, strained pulse, and with my mouth open, my jaw flapped and waved and rippled, cotton-like and bruised.

It started to drop, shaking as the magic wore off, and I let go.

Falling was nothing new - that, at least, was comfortable, familiar.

Once, I had stood on the very top of the tallest tower in Durmstrang, leaning against the spire with the wind burying his fingers in my hair and whisking away the smoke from the cigarette. Below me, the land had rolled on and on, white and spotless, broken only by the heads of evergreen trees and the curving lines of the school's walls.

I had jumped off, floating down to the ground as a feather did: slowly, rocked from side to side, tasting damp snow-water and ash.

That had been childish, relaxing, impulsively coquettish; this, then, was nothing like that.

I tumbled, wingless and spell-less, my tongue still too leaden to move, through a thin layer of low cloud - wet, wet and dismal, and it only confirmed to me what I already knew: England would be nothing; a miserable banishment with only the lure of a Peverell for comfort and I could not promise that to myself - and crumpled onto the ground in a heap, knees and elbows and shoulders first.

Beside me, my suitcases and trunk landed neatly on the lawn two metres away, near a pair of stone slab steps leading to a little, thatched cottage.

Father had always been a precise man.

The cottage was small: two stories tall with square-ish windows laden with flower-boxes in white-painted slatted wood, their rims done in a deep, even brown. A chimney stuck out one side of it, haphazard and squat, with smoke rising in long, grey ringlets. There was a door behind the steps, eggshell-blue with a burnished bronze handle; it was pristine, unnaturally so, and for a moment, lying there in the grass, I wondered whether Tante Hilda had used a preservation charm or a permanent fixing charm.

I barely had time to look at it all before the weight in my stomach returned, heavy and round, a bloating thing. My mouth was sour, bitter as almonds, and resentment curdled in a coil up and up the length of my throat.

I did not want to be there. I resented it, hated it, sulked over it.

Father had never been angry with me like that before: quiet and still, a captured storm waiting for the right time to explode. He had not insisted, in the end; he had merely said it, a fierce, furious sorrow in his voice - disappointed, he had told me, I am disappointed in you; ich bin enttäuscht von dir - and I had obeyed, blind and meek.

It had stung, in my chest and along my eyes, to think that he was sending me away; that I had failed and that was why he would send me away. It bristled along my skin, jabbing inside in slick, sleek pins which itched when they were pulled out.

"You will not apologise," father had told me when at last I stood in front of him, surrounded by my bags, one hand gripping the bannister in a vain attempt to pretend the decision had not already been made. His voice was steady enough that it made me sway where I stood. "You will learn."

"Ja," I had whispered, looking only at the floor.

So, there, in that half-overgrown garden with weeds as tall as my knees and sunflowers bowing over my head, with a tiny, plump blue tit hopping along the edge of a flecked-stone bird-bath with a series of bright, trilled tweets, I landed, out-cast and stranded, alone in a sea of hills and long grass fields giving way to thick, airy forests, stubborn and desperate and foolishly proud, to learn.

Something; anything, I thought then, would do - anything if only to leave this place, to go back home to the Schwarzwald, to my father.

And learn I did.

* * *

_8th December 1899_

It was evening: the sun was setting behind the pointed tops of long, thin pine trees, light filtered through weak and feeble, thin white-grey fingers which left the sprinkles of snow lying dusted along the boughs of trees shimmering, glittering as the wind tipped them off in a slow, rocking shiver and onto my head. Around me, the wind rustled through the trees in a single, continuous whisper, echoing throughout the forest, trapped within it for miles and miles around with nowhere to go but to settle on me: in my hair, on the backs of my hands, down the line of my jaw.

I froze in the twilight, trudging up the gentle slope through the forest towards the glimmer of orange-yellow fires in the distance.

Home; a strange, instinctive place.

I could not turn back - not now, not when I was so close. Not when I could hear my father's voice, see him smile and frown and tut at me; not when the lure of the fireplace and the dogs lying half across my chest on the thick fur rug was so close.

Six months only and it had felt like an age.

A glimpse of red; a half-choked laugh, and I stumbled, my hands sinking into sixteen centimetres of snow, wet and cold.

I had not been meant to return alone; it stung, the wounds still open, and I blinked four times quick, taking a deep, clouded breath, and pushed myself up again.

For a moment, when I stuttered, the world shuttered from the greyscale winter rolled out before me to a hellscape of red-and-black, the crackling of burning, splintering wood all around, white clouds stained black with soot, and an ache somewhere in the future.

I walked on: red-hair and red-flames and red-cheeked as the wind bit at me.

(What should have been; what could be; what is.

Was it strange for you, Albus, to live in such different times at once? To have a hand in one, a foot in another, and your head, your heart, the rest of your body in the last? To exist and not-exist and to have-existed all at once?

I did not ask; but then how to ask of something which is as natural as breathing? And how to explain to me something I cannot understand?

So, tell me, old friend, how do you live in one world alone? In the here and the now and the few-seconds-past, always pushing forwards?

Did you ever understand that when I told you together, together, together; when I told you we could not be parted, would not be separated; I did not mean just in this one life, this one possibility?

Oh but you will say I am a liar, yes? I am a liar and you are a fool and yet, and yet, my Albus, we are still together, are we not?

You cannot hear me laughing; in another time, you will.)

I found the track easily enough - so many warm summer evenings spent wandering through the woods, playing prey and predator with my father's wolf-hounds, jumping off trees and over logs as high as my waist, vanishing through a trunk and appearing on the other side, blossom in my hair and breathlessly laughing and I knew this forest, unhesitatingly and thoughtlessly; I stepped and went, mechanical and direct - where the snow sank into the dips left by the wagons, peppered by tracks of paw-prints and round, clipped hooves.

Up and up the road, round the curve as it turned so it lay flank-to-flank with the river, my hands blue-tipped, nails purpled, and my lungs creaking and cracking with each breath, dry and hot-cold. Tired and hungry, I could not think of anything other than that I was cold, that I wanted to be home - father could yell at me, hit me, disown me all he wanted, as long as I could be warm and home - and I was so very cold.

The house became visible by slivers. First, a corner of a wall, stone-bricks and flecked with dirt; then, a window: square and lined with lead, the curtains pulled over; the balcony which hung outside the upstairs drawing room - filled with books and boxes and an old, disused harpsichord which always chimed sad - and then, finally, the door, tucked in its alcove under the balcony, swept clean of most of the snow and dirt, brown and solidly impassable.

Before, I knew it I was there, the wind whipping past the confines of the alcove, raising a single, rigid hand to knock once, twice, three times.

There was a candle lit in the hall, a soft yellow glow leaking out of the small glass windows either side of the door, and I was suddenly about to cry.

The door opened with a click, swinging wide, and I fell inside, my head thunking into father's chest, my face in his shoulder and I shuddered, shoulders shaking even as he berated me in a strong, steady stream of German, his voice threaded with exasperation, fury and a sweet relief. It only washed over me, though, faint and soothing in a way I could not describe, and I clung, transformed into a child again, half-born syllables slipping out of my mouth and burying themselves in the red silk of my father's waistcoat.

"I worried about you," father said eventually, the words lost in my hair and I bit my lip.

"Please forgive me," I whispered, and felt, not heard, him sigh.

"Of course," he stepped back and looked me over, and I wondered, fleetingly what he saw.

Would he see only the summer clothes - the thin shirt tanned cream by the sun and the light waistcoat; the silk cravat around my neck and the smart, short-cut jacket? Would he see something of the last three months: that tremulous, storming confusion which had pushed me to let go of the Portkey over north-east France? Would he see the remains of you written in me somehow - in the way I stood, always half-searching for you, in how I held myself; would it be something he could see, that a father could tell, that first flush of desire and want and love?

"You look older," he commented, taking my bag off my shoulder and dropping it on the floor. "Come and eat something - there is venison and marzipan sweets."

He headed off to the kitchen, his boots on the wooden floorboards producing a familiar, melodic creaking rhythm, his wand already in hand to summon another plate and knife and fork, another glass for the small bottle of schnapps, and I - I stood there, watching.

"Father, I -" I tried, searching for some way to explain (what and how, though? I could not say the truth. I could not do that - I could barely think the truth to myself, I could not voice that in front of my father) the last three months, my impulsive flight of fancy.

He stopped and turned, raised an eyebrow and then smiled, soft and tired. In that moment, he looked older than before: his hair greyed in the white-bright candlelight, lines around his eyes and etched in the corners of his mouth. His hair was shorter than I had seen it last and there was a thick scruff of stubble on his jaw.

"We will talk tomorrow," he promised, and I nodded; there was a tickle at the backs of my eyes again and I thought furiously that I was enough an adult now not to do this, to not sink into this childish melancholy, sobbing over comfort, over relief. "For now, come and eat."

I followed him to the kitchen, sitting down at the rough-hewn table with its silver candle-holders and green-wax candles, the pot of venison stew hanging over the fireplace filling the room with a rich, spiced scent.

It took a moment to set it all out, another for father to pour me a glass of schnapps, and a third for us both to throw back the glasses in a swift, practiced motion.

"Did any letters arrive for me?" I asked; there was a hopeful strain in my voice I could not keep out, too nervous and too quick. Father glanced at me and then looked away, shaking his head.

"No, nothing," he replied, and I nodded once, short and stiff, focusing on eating - though it was not difficult: I had spent three months confunding shopkeepers and fruit-sellers, milkmaids and restaurant owners to get something to eat; picking berries from trees and bushes, washing them in the river and drinking water from the tip of my wand.

It was irrational but fierce, the swirl of jealousy, hot and bitterly sick, which flared in my stomach, rising up to snake along my throat and into my mouth. I swallowed, uncomfortable and nauseous, my only thought that you had not written to me.

You had not written to me.

Oh, Albus, my Albus, I do not think I had expected you to write to me - not after how it ended, not after Ariana, not after I had fled - but I could not pretend that I had not wanted you to, that I had not imagined arriving home and finding you here, perhaps, waiting for me, or bundles of letters on the table in the hall, between the silver dish for the keys and the tulip-shaped china vase which had always stood empty, my name written on the front in your spider-small handwriting, neat and precise.

You had written to your friend, after all - Elphias Doge - when you were trapped and confined, a bird in a cage.

Did I ever tell you how much I hated those letters? Every time you received one, you would sulk for days, distracted and maudlin, your smiles stopping at the corners of your mouth and when you claimed you were happy, quite content, your voice rang hollow. Eventually I learned to plan our time around these letters, irritations and disappointments, to cushion the blows they brought.

 As it is, you will know now.

(I would have burned all the letters you received from him as soon as they arrived, if I could have - I would have piled them high in a mound in the garden, built in a tall pyramid of beige parchment and set them alight with a twitch of my fingers, watching the smoke drift in loose coils up into the sky.

They did not help; they made you distracted, subdued and mournful like a whipped dog - I wanted you to be alive.

You would tell me it was selfish if I told you this - now or then or anytime. Albus, it was not selfish, no matter what you may think of me. It was for you; it would have been for you.)

One day, I remembered then and I remember now, a letter arrived and you came for me, finding me sprawled on a chaise in Bathilda's library with Cicero for company.

You were smiling at me, faint and fleeting, and your step was empty, lifeless and drained, and I knew in a heartbeat what had happened. When you slid onto the chaise longue next to me, kissing the corner of my mouth, it was perfunctory and chaste and quick, as it might be in a marriage which has outlived passion.

My mind raced, searching for something to comfort you, something other than the Hallows and the outside world - something abstract and elegantly challenging for you to focus that brilliant mind of yours on without leaving anything in reverse, behind to linger on melancholy - but you beat me, speaking before I could settle on something.

"Do you ever think," you asked me, your voice low, but there was something in your voice - a sort of urgency, or desperation - which made me think twice about interrupting you. "About the world? Not about conquering it or remaking it as it should be, but about simply seeing it?"

I was speechless, and my mind blank.

Of course I had thought of it, wished for it and hoped for it, but I had not thought to mention it: it would have been cruel to talk of wandering the globe at will, weightless and timeless, when I knew that time would come for me, but for you it was a spectre you chased and seemed never closer to catching.

To say that I had not expected you to mention it was an understatement: I had dismissed it completely.

Thankfully, I did not need to speak, as you continued, your eyes boring holes into the window even as your fingers stroked across my wrist.

"I cannot help but think of it, what it would be like to sail across the Mediterranean and down the Seine without worrying about anything other than having a grand time," you told me, and in my mind I could picture the letter from your friend: a tale of storm-tossed ships and hardy sailors, beset by mermaids and leviathans before the calm and the strange, unearthly beauty of the cliffs along the coastline.

You were a mystery, then, a labyrinth of stone-faced emotions and knotted, tangled threads, and I could not unravel you - could not even find where to begin.

Be proud of yourself, Albus. It will not happen again.

"Wonderful, no doubt," I murmured, mostly to myself. It was a statement, really, devoid of personal feeling or any kind of real emotion in it, but the words alone were enough to seize your attention and fix it on me for a moment.

You looked at me, and for a moment, I felt naked, my soul bared to you.

"So you have thought of it," you replied, and it was not a question; you knew I had thought of it - I had given myself away to you.

A lie would have been easy, simple and witty, but there was a light in your eyes, strange and ghost-white, gleaming steady, which I had not seen before, and I was tongue-tied, caught staring, and curious.

"I want to go everywhere," I admitted, feeling a smile ghosting over my face as I thought of it - all those carefully laid plans I had made the years before. "I want to go to Russia and run across the tundra with the tigers; I want to ride horses across the steppe in Hungary and Prussia and see the phoenixes in flight in the dawn. I want to go to China and learn how to fly a dragon, and see the curses carved into the wall. There is so much to do, but it would be so wonderful."

"It would," you agreed, and you gripped my wrist, thumb tucking in underneath my fingers. "Particularly if one went with a friend - to explore such things together..."

You did not look at me; the implication was clear.

Reaching over, my heart thumping in my chest, exhilarated and nervous at the same time - for this marked something, meant something; even if I did not quite know what, I knew that it was important in some way - I slid a finger along your jaw, forcing you to look at me. You barely made it, starting to flush and staring at me intently, that strange light now burning.

Then, I kissed you.

At first, you kissed me back automatically, fingers going slack on my wrist, then you slipped an arm under my jacket, gripping, tight and questioning, on my hips, two fingers running along the waist of my trousers and tugging, impatient, at my shirt. I tangled my fingers in your hair, long and loose, already starting to fumble with the buttons on your waistcoat and collar as you pushed me down. Your tie - Ascot-style silk, muggle and fashionable - slid through my fingers, slick and sleek, falling onto my shoulder as you kissed your way down my neck, nipping at the end of my collarbone to draw out a gasp.

Even as I forgot to think - all words, English or German or Hungarian, driven from my mind by pure sensation - I heard you murmur something into the hollow of my throat, letting it ghost over before pressing it into my skin in a hard, bruising kiss; I shuddered and felt you smile.

Later, in between indolent kisses, the ends of your hair tickling on my bare chest as the sunlight filtered through them like a curtain of auburn strands, you twined our fingers together and said,

"We should go to Germany first."

It was a simple statement, but it set my stomach to twisting and I had to swallow, feeling suddenly, strangely lost.

"Ja, I would like that," I whispered back, admiring the sweep of your shoulders and the lines and curves of muscle and bone in your arms, how they dipped and rose like the hills and valleys outside.

We had had plans, then, plans which spawned dreams, unspoken dreams of us wandering through the trees, hand in hand, how you would kiss me by the waterfalls, and sit at their spout to watch the sun set through the lush flush of trees in front of us, a spiked-green carpet.

It was childish, flooding me with embarrassment and a guilty, creeping shame, and I tried to cover it, to hide it from you - when you looked at me, high on the pedestal you had hoisted me onto, with eyes full of promises and demands and expectations cast in gold, I did not want you to stop, to see how I was still just a boy.

There, though, in Germany, back in Schwarzwald with my father and the frozen sprays over the rocks where the waterfalls would be in spring, there I sat, a second glass of schnapps warming my stomach, light-headed and sleepy, my jealousy tumbling as I slumped in the chair. I thought of you and dreamed, half in day and half in night, of you and I knew, in a burst of clarity which left my skin damp and burning, that you would not come for me. Not again. Not here.

What was past was past and what could have - should have been - could not be again.

That night, my eyes on the stars, I prayed in my mother's tongue that perhaps there would be a second chance; perhaps I might be wrong.

(I think, though, Albus - dear Albus, liebling - that I am too much of you to be granted a second chance.) 


End file.
